Written With My Left Hand

by Nugent Barker

  My first sign to Trude that I needed her was a man’s voice hailing from the roadway. She looked up quickly over the latest piece of that growing collection of embroideries with which she had been occupying a great part of these early, ineffectual years; her hands fluttered to her heart, and slowly, very slowly, the blood ebbed from her face; she walked to the window, and saw beneath her the figure of a man in a cut-away coat and riding-breeches, sitting on a white horse. The man and the horse were extraordinarily motionless—there was a kind of expectancy in the two figures—the horse’s head was as rigid as the figurehead of a docked ship, and the man was staring up at Trude’s window with his fixed, scrutinous gaze. Then she ran out to speak with him. Whilst he stooped from the saddle, they had a long, low conference together; presently she ran back into her castle, the man and his horse pattered away, and throughout the evening there was a sound of boxes in her bedroom, the heavy, leather boxes of the period, a sound of cupboards being emptied and of the boxes being filled, of excursions of her hurrying feet along the stone corridors, to some distant quarter of the castle and back again. She slept ill that night—I was aware of her excitement—of the number of times she turned her pillow—of the smiling into the darkness. When I awoke in the morning her room was empty, she was gone, the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein had become a rising factor in Middle Europe.

  II

  And for a week, a month, I, who had created her, found the greatest difficulty in recognising this new-fledged, vivacious Trude who threw her eyes about like a play-actress, sold secrets, set the women against her, snapped her fingers, and tilted her chin. . . .

  Well. It is a strange, contradictory power, and you cannot deny it; I mean the power by which sometimes authors are held in the hollow of their characters’ hands. Did she steal a document from the Count’s bureau, then my finger, too, would be at my lips, and my eyes peeping watchfully over my shoulder. The things she did! As bold as brass! And very often these early stories would be centred on amours of a piquant though not very terrible kind.

  But in those Victorian days I was scarcely surprised to discover that one or two of the English papers were writing articles on the pernicious trend of the new fiction. What! Trude—Trude and I—took no notice of that; on the contrary, she persisted more flagrantly than ever in her gallivanting. Also she extended the scene of her political activities, running down to the island of Caprera, and there holding long interviews with Garibaldi, at that time an old man of nearly seventy (and an old bachelor, too, seeing that he was no longer united to the Countess Raimondi); it was thought that he might be game enough yet for an occasional crack against the Germans. As he listened to her rather gabbling, earnest account of things possible, I fancy his fingers would tap, and his eyes twinkle through the villa windows to La Maddalena, or to white sails slanting over the sea. Also one summer she took a big ‘palace’ on the Rio della Paglia at Venice, became the heroine of a dozen of my shorter, more picturesque stories—‘Gondolaria’, I called them—and for two years never saw her castle on the western bank of the Rhine. When she returned home, the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein found awaiting her, in one of the many ante-rooms that I had built for private conversations, a stunted, squarish woman with thick arms and a heavy nose—a black dress shaking with sequins—a voice raised imperiously over some ridiculous wrong—and this was the opening scene of perhaps the most successful of the earlier Geyerstein tales. By that time, I had published half a dozen books of short and long stories, my reputation—better call it my popularity—was growing by leaps and bounds, Pawson and Wainwright wanted as much of Gertrude as I could give them. You can see those volumes in the book-case behind me—the books that you say you have never read—Adventures of the Princess Gertrude, Arnholdt Castle, Further Adventures of the Princess Gertrude, Gondolaria, Queen of the Rhine, A Princess Interferes. . . . Trash. All trash. . . . Yet they had their day. Most of my stories at that period were published by Messrs Pawson and Wainwright, from their early premises in Essex Street; Andrew Wainwrigbt is still living, you know, and often he and I talk over those old tales and times.

  Trude! What a time you had! Yes, what a time she had, coming and going, swaying empires, breaking men’s hearts and sometimes being left in the lurch; the perfect adventuress! One autumn—you can turn back to this in the old papers—Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary of those days, caused a warrant to be applied for, with Pawson and Wainwright and the Elephant Press as defendants. The charge was not unexpected, either by them or by me: a charge of libel against some Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Court; the magistrate stroked his chin; and the book was withdrawn before any disastrous damage had been done. That book, with the others, stands on the shelf behind me; it became the turning-point of my career. In the spring of 1884, I took a house in Swan Walk, Chelsea, where I looked through the beautiful iron gateway of the Physic Gardens. There my imagination found a new impetus in the shrubs and plants that held a million grains of apothecary’s poison in their innocent hearts. This was the beginning of my brightest period. And it went on for years.

  Then one day the Princess Gertrude returned to her castle, arms hanging, with nothing whatever to do; for there was an interval of a whole year during which my invention failed me, I wrote no books, I was travelling in South America for the sake of the experience, and with deep sympathy for her I set about composing new pastimes for my poor Trude—games of Patience played with tiny packs of beautifully pictured cards—songs that she learnt and sang to the accompaniment of a lute in the twilight—a new dress, at which she was to work for who knows how long . . . until I should call her again, and she could dazzle me with its brightness. . . .

  It was during this period, too, that Trude, having returned with knowledge of the world, discovered the dungeons. The world, here, was indeed but a sprinkling of light upon the floor; the walls were a-glimmer with snow-white fungus; and in this place she would spend hours at a time, round-eyed, looking at the instruments of torture, conjuring up the screams of the past. And from the dungeons, she would hurry away at last to the spiced air, the silken altar, the statued niches, and carved corbels of the tiny, six-sided chapel at the top of the keep.

  When I returned to Chelsea, she took quite frankly to petty but spectacular crime.

  It was a short, bright series, loudly coloured, yet it did not fit as naughtily as it should have done into the ’nineties, when Wilde and Beardsley and the Yellow Book were powers in the land. Powers, too, in a softer, more domestic mood, were Holmes and Watson, and Martin Hewitt, and the Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, and because of these persons, soon my poor Trude began to wear very thin—she tottered, and must receive stimulants to pull her together. I could not find them. The old tricks were useless now. Who wanted the old tricks? The thefts, the stratagems, the love-makings, and the peccadillos? Yet what else could she do? Trude and I were unable to think of anything else. I still wrote my stories; published them; it was expected of me; they were not really wanted. Then one day I heard the critics saying that it was time I killed Trude.

  ‘Killed Trude?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Trude. . . . Oh! . . . Why that? But I knew that they were right. Kill Trude. That’s it. Kill her dead. Kill her off. Bury her deep. Had it come to that? My wonderful Trude . . . . I must shut up shop. I must write my last Geyerstein tale.

  So I took a cottage—this cottage—in the village of Beeding. I dare say you saw quite a lot of the village as you came up the road. It is very small. The Adur runs near, to the west; on warm evenings I walk as far as the river banks, and there, in miniature, I build a fanciful representation of Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein’s castle. Sometimes I have an inspiration—a new story jumps into my mind—but it is of no use, now. How she would have liked it! How well she would have played it! No one better. What a pair, she and I!

  I had come to this place for the purpose of cutting myself adrift from the old associations. Nothing would have distressed me more, t
han to slay Trude amid the familiar signs of success in my Chelsea home: then, to look up, and, out of my window, to see the quiet plants in the Physic Gardens. Yet even here it was not easy—at first it was impossible—to endue myself with a murderous mind. The place was like a painted picture; and look at that glimpse of the sunny street! Through the whole of one spring I dallied in this very room; moreover, I began to write another of my Venetian tales, in which not a vestige of harm was to come to my dear Trude.

  Near the end of this story, I was possessed by a powerful longing for the dear lady’s decease.

  ‘If I don’t kill her now,’ I argued, ‘Trude will go on living long after I am dead.’ And the thought of her death, with no one sitting beside her, in the years to come, on the canopied bed with its pillars of fine Riemenschneider woodcarving, while the sun, or the moon, or the stars, shone, or beamed, or twinkled, into the lancet windows of the castle, filled me with the acutest dismay.

  At about this time, do you remember, Conan Doyle slew Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty; and when I heard of this event, I nodded my head, telling myself that all was settled now between Trude and me; that Trude must die of the fever in Lithuania; or drown in the waters of the swift Rhone; or fall with a bullet through her heart in a box at the Milan Opera House; or drop with a dagger between her ribs, at the mouth of an alley in Barcelona. It was then, of course, that I made my great discovery . . . the discovery that I loved her better than anything else on earth.

  And my love was not due to the solitary fact that through her I had been able to hold my head very high above water for upwards of forty years. It was due also to a colossal pride. Pride that I had created her, that the whole wild series of Geyerstein tales was utterly and triumphantly mine. The blending of these two passions decided me finally on one part, at least, of the course that ought to be taken. How could I allow my dear Trude to die in Germany, with leagues of ocean between us? Better far that she should rest in my own country, where she had never been. And I cannot tell you all the cunning ways by which, in this final adventure of the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein, I sought to ease the burdens of her journey to England—taking upon myself the duties of some spiritual tourist-agent, noting that the boat then sailing from the Hook of Holland was a good ship, well appointed, with the littlest capacity for rolling, and a cabin amply suited to the Princess’s high-born constitution; urging my imagination to surround her with sweet faces and pleasant voices on the Harwich quay, and in the London train to ply her with a luncheon-basket from the depths of which I swear that I could catch the aroma of hot coffee, foie-gras sandwiches, and currant buns. In the whirl of London I lost her for a moment—found her—lost her again . . . then caught a glimpse of her back as she entered the Sussex train. At my elbow, the pot of untouched tea was nearly cold, the pages of my manuscript were piling in front of me, and presently I began to ask myself at what time she should arrive? At about this time? I looked at the clock: the hands were pointing to a quarter to seven. On an evening like this? I looked at the window: and the beautiful evening was already turning red. At that moment I saw a group of shadows moving grotesquely on the flat of the village street . . . the persons to whom they belonged were hidden from me by the intervening abutment of my cottage wall . . . but in the quiet air I could hear voices, and I could hear, too, something that one of the voices said . . .

  ‘Dat liddle white house yarnder, leddy.’

  In such a manner she came to me, with a gentle knock that sent a flutter through the hall.

  III

  You may be certain that I was very curious to see this Trude; and I did not doubt that she was equally inquisitive to set eyes on me. I hurried to the door, and stood aside when she entered, so that the first thing that I saw of her was the side of her bonneted head. There was a finger of grey hair tapping her cheek; and especially it was her nose that told me I had not lived in vain. It was most beautifully modelled, a clear-cut and delicate thing, being neither too pushful nor too lazy; but her walk, alas, was full of weariness, she stooped a little at the shoulders, and I noticed that her lips and ears were faintly tinged with blue.

  She was now turning towards me, with an ease and confidence that pleased me the more because I knew that she, too, was as nervous as a schoolchild.

  ‘Oh! Won’t you give me your hand?’

  That, in fact, is what I wanted to say (wondering, at the same time, whether she would be confused by the English fashion); but this strange blending of shyness and composure frustrated any immediate attempt at conversation, hurried us through the hall, and brought us to a rather tensive standstill in my writing-room. Here the declining sun was twinkling on the tea-pot; the globular surface of the latter showed me the walls and window extended almost to bursting-point, and after gazing at the fiery picture for an unconscionable period, ‘Shall I,’ I murmured, turning to the Princess, ‘ask Maggie to make fresh tea?’

  She listened attentively to my voice, which she heard now for the first time. Ach, zo. Ach, zo. And once or twice her head nodded. Presently her cheeks flushed, and she answered my question in a low, guttural English that enchanted me with its wrong words and Germanesque phrases. ‘Wonn-der-ful,’ I heard her saying, ‘to have tea at you.’

  She showed, too, now that the ice was broken, and she and I were standing on the footing of almost old friends, a woman’s lively interest in my room: her eyes, travelling over the four corners, soon found the sheets of my uncompleted manuscript: she walked towards them, her shadow fell upon the scattered papers, and so did her hand, in light, caressing touches that reminded me of persons reading from Braille.

  ‘Dear stories. . . . But what, now,’ she added, turning over the leaves, until she came to that unfinished paragraph in which her own presence had taken up the narrative, and I had put down my pen, ‘shall you do by me?’

  We laughed; it was not my intention, I told her, to send her out adventuring until she had refreshed herself with hot tea and toast, and was properly rested; Maggie coming in at that moment, I desired the girl to prepare these delicacies as quickly as she was able. ‘Maggie doesn’t take after her mother,’ I said to the Princess, nodding across the street; ‘the girl’s a great dawdler.’ Thereafter we talked of indifferent things until the tea came, and the Princess’s bonneted head was bending above the tray.

  While she sat there, sipping her tea, and presiding over the tea-table, I took stock of her. A tall woman, rather bigly made, and by now so sadly gaunt; yet always with an adorable mixture of waywardness and tractability playing through the strong hands, from which I gathered that at heart the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein was entirely beautiful. She had believed in her world of wickedness no more than I. We had cut our capers, we had put our tongues in our cheeks. And now that it was all over, and the first inquisitivenesses of our meeting were ended, and she was sipping her ‘English tea’, I noticed again the blueness of her lips and ears, and decided that perhaps she had become vaguely ‘asthmatical’. At any rate, the slight oppression of her breathing caused a certain monotony to fill the room; and while she looked down at her plate, with faintly humped shoulders, I began to amuse myself with a mental abridgment of her life history. And what a history! I ran over some of her escapades. I wondered which of them had diverted her most. Perhaps she guessed something of my thoughts, for suddenly she looked up, smiling, and saying: ‘yes?’

  ‘A little more tea?’ I murmured. ‘You must.’

  She nodded her head.

  ‘Was it the adventure with Count Karlbach, or the theft of señora Lucilla’s jewels?’

  ‘Ach, Gott! Ach, Gott!’ Such a pretty laugh! I could have kissed her, but did not dare. Instead, I postponed the potato soup, the roasted fowl, and the cheese savoury—dishes that would have clashed too heavily with her tea—and on my return from the kitchen, began to pass the time in questioning the Princess closely on the hundred and one ramifications of the castle—the exact shape of its rooms—was it true that there exist
ed a second version of Hans Holbein’s Solothurn Madonna in one of the bed-chambers?—could she see both Köln and Mainz from the oriel window?—or whither led that winding corridor that I had seen so often, through the low archway near the foot of the keep? For long she continued to enlighten me upon these subjects; but eventually her answers became so hazy, and lazy, and far between; then there were such awkward silences; that at last I was scarcely surprised to hear a snore starting from the Princess’s chair.

  ‘Dear God!’ I muttered, ‘why, she is an old woman, worn out!’ Whereupon I hurried to the door, and called to Maggie that she was to prepare the sunny bedroom over the porch: but my voice awakened the Princess, who set up a sharp fit of coughing, and held a tiny unstoppered bottle beneath her nose.